[C]ritics of the offshore drilling restrictions argue the additional oil
and gas is needed if the country is to move toward greater energy
independence,

Great shades of John David Rockefeller! Is there any way to get through these people's heads that the reason we are dependent on foreign oil is that we are dependent on oil?

If we have an addiction, as the President half-heartedly observed in his last State of the Union address, a statement he meant as sincerely as his promise to get us to Mars a few years back, then allowing drilling off the coasts is like a junkie moving on to another corner and pronouncing himself cured because he can buy his fix a block closer to home.

Ah well. Of course the point of this is not to make the nation more energy self-sufficient. It's to make oil companies money.

The country's full of greedy people who are very pious in their money-grubbing. They've convinced themselves that they are doing God's work raping and plundering the planet and when Jesus comes back he's expecting to find that what hasn't been paved over has been clearcut and strip-mined.

But there are even more greedy people who just don't give a damn. They don't think about the future or consequences. They don't even think about how to make money. They just react to its presence. They smell gold and they reach for their pickaxes and shovels and head for the hills.

There is an all too common type of greedhead who can't stand to look at anything---a mountain, a coastline, a house, a government program like Social Security, the Internet---and know that no one they know personally is making a million bucks off it.

There are people for whom the possibility of making a million bucks sometime in the future is more real than the hundred thousand dollars they're making at the moment.

The tourist business in the states whose economies and environments would be ruined by the inevitable oil spills bring in billions and billions of dollars. But that money isn't real.

The real money is under the water.

Money you already have doesn't count. It's only the money you can make. If you fail to make it, then it doesn't matter how much you've got in the bank and under the mattress, you're a chump, you've let yourself get robbed.

The oil companies behind this aren't getting any of the tourists' money, so of course they feel robbed. But the congressmen they've bought, including 40 Democrats, are supposed to have their districts' interests at heart.

Well, if you look at what else they've done, they appear to, in a way.

[The bill] changed the revenue sharing so that states' share of royalties would soar eventually as much as 75 percent.

The Gulf states where most U.S. offshore energy resources are being
tapped, now get less than 5 percent of the royalties. For example,
Louisiana's royalties would go from $32 million last year to a total of
$8.6 billion over the next 10 years — and even higher after that.

The Interior Department estimated that the changes could cost the
federal government as much as $69 billion in lost royalties over 15
years and "several hundred billion dollars" over 60 years.

The White House issued a statement saying it favors much of the bill
but strongly opposes the changes in royalty revenue sharing, which it
said "would have a long-term impact on the federal deficit."

In other words, the bill is yet another way for the poor, corrupt, failed deep Southern States like Louisiana---two of the chief architects of the bill are Louisianans---to take more money from the rest of us who already give them more than our fair share of our federal taxes.

They don't do anything for their citizens and they still can't get by on our subsidies. All that oil revenue that will supposedly come to them will wind up in the same back pockets as the money the rest of us send them.

Meanwhile:

The Interior Department estimates there are about 19 billion barrels of
recoverable oil and 86 trillion cubic feet of natural gas beneath
waters under drilling bans from New England to southern Alaska.

<snip>

The country uses about 21 million barrels of oil a day.

That works out to 7,665,000,000 barrels a year.

In short, there's less than three years worth of oil out there.

And when it's used up, how far along the road to energy independence will we be?

Campaspe, the Self-Styled Siren, is back from Paris and settled into her new Brooklyn digs and she's gotten right down to work, despite some lack of cooperation from her cable company. She's posted an appreciation of screen siren, Lana Turner, finding in her career an awful lot of good movies for an actress of supposedly limited talent. The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Bad and the Beautiful, and Imitation of Life are three that Campaspe looks at in depth.

Probaly inaccurate to call Turner a siren. Sirens are known for their seductive voices. Turner's allure wasn't her voice, as Campaspe observes:

Of course there is a huge history of actresses who break into films
based solely on their magical looks. Lana's distinction was to get a
break based on how she filled a sweater. As she walked across a street
to her doom in They Won't Forget, who could concentrate on the
foreshadowing? Lana's breasts seemed to move independently of Lana, as
an awestruck Mervyn LeRoy noted.

Turner wasn't a great actress, but she had more talent than she's been credited with, and with the right director she could be very, very good, says C.

Vincente Minnelli said he wanted Lana, not Jennifer Jones, for Madame
Bovary, but was told by the censors that Lana would bring too much
blatant sexuality to the story of adultery. The director had to wait to
work with her, but with The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), he got Lana's best performance:

"Lana
was at the height of her career, one of the top sex symbols in films.
Those who made easy judgments said that in being manufactured into a
personality, one very important cog had been left out: a consuming
talent. This to me was unfair.

"I agreed with John Houseman's
assessment of Lana's acting ability. 'On a long curve, she's never been
capable of sustaining a whole picture as an actress,' he told me. 'But
on the short curve she's very good.'

"My challenge was to make her portrayal a series of short curves."

"A
series of short curves;" clearly he understood her as few directors
did. Lana's character is an actress haunted by a dead, brilliant
father. But the character is also terrified that she is all beauty and
no talent, which must have cut pretty close. Lana nails every scene,
but the Siren's favorite is the sequence where Kirk Douglas turns her
into an actress in a bizarre historical epic (obviously meant to evoke Gone with the Wind
in scope if not plot, David O. Selznick being a loose model for
Douglas's character). Here you have Vincente Minnelli coaxing a
performance out of an insecure beauty, who is playing an insecure
beauty having a performance coaxed out of her. Years later in his
memoirs, I Remember It Well, Minnelli said his trick was to
blame everyone except Lana for any retake. Darling, you were wonderful,
but the lights weren't right, the sound man messed up, etc. By the end
Lana was probably convinced she was the most competent person on set.
It shows.

Read the rest and C.'s takes on The Bad and the Beautiful, Postman, and Ziegfield Girl in Lana.

Other day, I was out back, working on the pool, again, and while I was wiping out the lid of the filter with some maddeninlgy flimsy paper towels, I was struck with a brilliant idea.

"You know," I said to myself, "I should keep a crate or two of those blue paper shop towels back here in the shed just for this job."

And because I knew that this was a good plan and that I would go down to the hardware store later and pick some up and that having the towels out there would make the job easier, my day was made. I went about the rest of the chore of hosing down the cartridge filter and restarting the pump cheerful and content, as if a great load had been lifted from my mind.

How dull is my life?????

Last time I mentioned having a pool here several readers wrote in to express their surprise and envy.

They hadn't imagined, they said, that I've been living the kind of life of ease and leisure that is the privilege of pool owners.

Obviously, none of them has ever owned a pool.

Also, they got the wrong impression.

They were picturing an in-ground, Beverly Hills mansion, water as blue as a David Hockney painting idyll of a pool.

What we have is a 21 ft above-ground pool that's just the right size for the boys and their friends to splash around in on a hot summer day but which the blonde and I rarely swim in because, well, an adult can't really swim in it. Couple of strokes and you've crossed it. Takes just a few more strokes to circle it. So in effect it's just a larger version of the kiddie pools we've always had in our yard since the guys were little.

The pool came with the house and along with it we bought a whole lot of daily maintenance jobs and headaches I had no idea how to do or fix. Each of the three summers we've been here now has been a new class in the proper care and feeding of a backyard swimming pool as I've had to teach myself and then re-teach myself lessons on chemicals, running and repairing a pump, filtration, vacuuming, cleaning, handling algae blooms, and on and on.

You're probably getting the impression that I hate owning a pool, and mornings and evenings when I go out back to tend to it I do.

But when I look out there on a bright sunny day and see one or the other of the guys rushing off the deck to cannonball into the water and I watch the spray leap up into the sunlight and flash like crystal and wait for the diver's head to pop up over the edge, a big grin on his face, I love it.

I never love having a lawn though.

My pool chores make me grumpy but I see the point in them and they have a reward.

Taking care of the lawn just makes me mad. And it makes me feel dumb. Really, is there a more comical and pathetic sight in suburbia than that of a middle-aged man pushing a lawn mower?

Taking care of the pool has this compensation, it routinely sends me out to the hardware store and pool supply store. Trips to the hardware store and specialty stores are the great, solacing joys of home maintenance. Mowing the lawn just sends me back and forth to the gas station.

I hate mowing the lawn. Hate it worse than folding clothes. (On the other hand, I enjoy vacuuming, which seems odd to me because in a way it's just an indoor version of lawn mowing. You drag a big noisy machine around instead of push it, but it's back and forth, repetitive work that seems to need doing again almost as soon as you've finished, and there are no solacing trips to the hardware store, but I still don't mind it.) Pool maintenance is nothing next to lawn mowing. I'd let the whole lawn go to seed if I could. I'd roto-till every blade of it and plant wildflowers if the blonde would let me.

I would hire a lawn service except that I couldn't stand to watch anybody do a job I should be doing myself.

As I wrote over the weekend, in my New York City the people are always courteous and thoughtful, in their fashion. They go out of their way to help you, even if you don't think you need their help.
Turns out that my New York is the Readers Digest's New York too. The magazine took a poll that ranked New York as the most courteous major city in the world.

Other evening, I was browsing through the stacks, looking for something to watch that night and ideas for movies to put in the old Netflix queue. Picked up and considered the following.

Game 6. Michael Keaton. Screenplay by Don Delillo. Two pluses right off the bat. Robert Downey Jr. Another plus. Bebe Neuwirth, possibly getting naked. Hard to tell from reading the box. But even if she keeps her clothes on, Bebe's a definite plus. Game six of the the 1986 World Series featuring as the McGuffin that drives the plot. Ok, it's rented already. Clincher. Keaton's character's a playwright living in terror of a vicious drama critic. The world I left behind.

Wodehouse: Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.

Syriana. No brainer. Surprised at myself for not having it in my queue already.

While I'm working my way along the stacks, the monitors in the stores are showing trailers for a hundred movies there's no way I'm going to see unless I'm forced at gunpoint onto an airplane and one of them's the in-flight film and I forgot a book and can't borrow a magazine and I can't get drunk fast enough on those tiny little liquor bottles to make myself pass out.

So I'm not paying the least bit of attention, until I hear...

Her voice.

Zooey Deschanel.

I snap to attention, find the closest monitor, and look and find I'm watching the trailer for Failure to Launch.

Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew McConaughey in a movie that answers the burning question, Just how cute and adorable can Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew McConaughey be together?

There's a long tradition of movies that are about nothing except how cute and adorable the two stars are and won't it be just thrilling when they smooch?

I give most of these the skip. Half the time they don't even register. Failure to Launch came and went at the cineplexes without my noticing. If I had been aware of it, I wouldn't have gone, and I wouldn't be giving it a thought now except for Zooey Deschanel's being in it, because I want to know:

Who makes a movie and casts Zooey Deschanel as second banana to the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker?

(Failure to Launch also looks as though it's another movie pushing LOVE as the solution to everything that's wrong with you and your life, which means it's mush.)

While I was watching the trailer, which went on forever, as too many trailers do---I don't need to see the movie now, probably---I had another question.

Just how much longer can fortysomething Sarah Jessica Parker go on playing twenty-two?

This is not an age-ist attack on her looks or her being a fortysomething romantic lead. She looks great, except for being like just about every movie actress these days too thin, and she can play early to mid-thirtysomething with a minimum of soft focus and flattering lighting, which is what I think she's supposed to be playing in Failure to Launch.

But what the script calls for and what the director and she are doing with the character appear to be different things.

Parker's a terrific physical comedian, and cute as a bug, but isn't it time she put her talents to work playing an actual grown-up?

From what I saw, Parker was doing her little girl lost act once again, the same act that began to wear so terribly towards the end of Sex and the City.

The premise of Sex and the City was, in the first couple of seasons, that life in New York for the young and beautiful and single is a wonderful adventure. But under the frothy surface there was a darker theme swimming along like a shark ready to rise.

All four of the leading characters were not that young. Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte were in their early thirties. Samantha was pushing forty. Yet they were all still living their lives exactly as they might have been when they were in their 20s or even, if they'd gone to college in New York, in their late teens.

While the lives of their married and settled contemporaries were usually portrayed as living nightmares to be avoided at all costs, whenever they came in contact with twentysomethings whose lives paralleled their own, they recoiled with another kind of horror. There was a shock of recognition. The places in time and space they were occupying and desperately trying to hold onto belonged to other, much younger women---to girls.

None of the characters admitted it out loud, but they were all conscious that there was a competition going on that they were bound to lose, and if they didn't change their lives themselves, find a new space to occupy, a new role in life to play, when they did lose, when they were pushed out by the younger women, by the girls, there would be nowhere for them to go, except into caricature, self-parody, and absurdity.

They were always on the verge of becoming jokes to themselves.

What all of them---except Carrie---were hunting for was not a man to save them, but a path to a more grown up way of living their lives.

By the final season, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha had all completed their individual progresses towards real adulthood. There was some criticism of the last episodes that the show had gone soft and consigned all the leads to lives of happily ever aftering in the arms of their men. But that misses the more important changes in Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte.

All three were forced by painful circumstances into giving up their illusions about themselves.

This was most obvious in Samantha's case. She had to admit more than just that she was not going to be young and beautiful forever. She had to admit that she was going to die.

At the end it looks as though Sam's rewarded with the enternal love of her young god, Smith, but Sam knows. At some point, sooner or later, she will have to give him up. This bout of cancer hadn't killed her, but that doesn't mean there won't be another that will, and even if she's lucky, time catches up with all of us and we are forced to let go.

Samantha, who wanted it all and thought she had it, finishes by accepting that life isn't a matter of getting and having, it's all about what you have to give up.

Miranda has to admit that she is not a lone wolf and that she cannot continue to live as though she has no responsibilities to anyone else and no one is responsible for her. What I really liked about the way the writers handled this was that Miranda never does go soft. She doesn't like having to give up her independence, and when she finishes up chasing after Steve's mother through the streets and bringing her home and cleaning her up, you can see, thanks to Cynthia Nixon's brilliance, that Miranda is not happy and knows she is not going to be happy that this is the path her life is going to take, but she also knows that this is what she wants anyway.

What a terrible and terribly grown up idea. That what makes us happy can also make us miserable and that sticking with it is the right thing to do despite its making us miserable, because giving it up would make us even more miserable.

Charlotte gets off lightest. Her illusion was that she was born to be a princess but had somehow been evicted from the castle. But because she was always the most good-hearted of the four, the producers decided to reward her without making her learn the hard lessons Sam and Miranda had to learn. When Charlotte gives up the idea that she is meant to be a princess, that she will ever have her dreams come true, her dreams come true. She doesn't learn the lesson consciously, she just lives it---it turns out that she has always been a real princess.

Still, in having to give up her illusions, to let go some of her dreams, to realize that she can't have everything she wants just because she wants it (and even deserves it), she becomes a real grown-up.

The actresses who played them, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis, recognized what was happening to their characters and they not only played them accordingly, they let themselves start to show their age.

This didn't mean they let themselves appear less beautiful. If anything, they all grew more beautiful, especially Nixon, who up until the last season seemed sometimes to go out of her way to make herself the plainest Jane of the four.

But they let themselves look tired. They let themselves look weathered, so to speak, lined, careworn, too busy or frazzled or demoralized to care how they looked, resigned to the fact that they were not as young and glamorous as they were when the show started.

They stopped playing their parts as girls. They started to act middle-aged.

Sarah Jessica Parker went the other way.

By they end she was visibly desperate to pass as twenty-two. She wasn't simply trying to look twenty-two. She was acting even harder to move and react as if she was still twenty-two.

Carrie was the one who had the fewest illusions about herself. What she had instead was a single dream.

That dream was for a man to come along and gather her up and take care of her.

It was a little girl's dream.

In the end, the dream comes true.

Big comes back and gathers her up---he picks her up off the floor---and he's clearly going to take care of her forever.

The other three's happy endings all require them to become grown-ups. For Charlotte and Miranda this is made manifest in their becoming mothers and in having familes to take care of. For Samantha's it's realized her in imminent death.

There's also a sense in which Sam becomes responsible for Smith as if he's not just her family, but her child, and I think it was implicit at the end that Samantha knew there was going to come a time when like a mother she was going to have to push Smith out of the nest. Someday, even if she didn't die, she would have to give him up. Another woman, one his own age with whom he could have a family, would appear and Samantha seemed to know that it would be up to her to make sure Smith did not miss his chance to become a grown-up.

However it would come about, loss and responsibility for another person were going to be defining facts of her future.

But Carrie doesn't have to give up anything or accept responsibility for anybody or anything.

She's going to go on and on and on as Big's little girl.

She would have him all to herself, and he would devote himself entirely to her.

She would never have to grow up.

Which was fine for the show, I guess.

But I wish Sarah Jessica Parker didn't seem intent on a career of keeping Carrie Bradshaw a little girl forever.

Being an absolute ruler today was not as easy as people thought. At least, it was not simple if your ambitions included being an absolute ruler tomorrow. There were subtleties. Oh, you could order men to smash down doors and drag people off to dungeons without trial, but too much of that thing was bad for business, habit-forming, style-lacking, and very, very dangerous for your health. A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least he could tell the people he was their fault.

Should probably stay away from this one. After all, if to look upon a woman with lust in one's heart is to commit adultery with her, then to spend an hour or so writing about looking upon a woman with lust in my heart must be adultery at one remove. But, save me Lord, I am weak and a sinner, and I cannot resist the temptation.

"Truthfully,"
he wrote, "I'm very embarrassed to address the subject .... My concern
is the serious lapse in the virtue of modesty on the part of a
significant number of women in our community. The V-neck dresses and
blouses expose their breasts inappropriately, drawing attention to
their bodies rather than to themselves as Christian women."

Drawing attention to yourself as a Christian woman can be another and more pernicious form of vanity, of course. The young women in his congregation wearing those V-neck dresses may be far more modest, that is lacking in spiritual vanity, than these women:

"It's ridiculous to walk around showing everything," said a choir
member, who asked to remain anonymous. "Men and women must have
modesty."

But why?

"I think we live in a society that has
lost its sense of sexual morality," Valastro said. "People have lost
that obligation to preserve their purity."

Minister Kim Jackson
of New Hope Baptist Church in Newburgh agrees with the monsignor. "We,
as women, know what we have," she said. "This is about respecting God."

"If
I know that my cleavage hanging out offends you," said New Hope
Deaconess Stephanie Cook, "the Christ in me should want to stop that."

<snip>

Décolletage is still distracting, said Valastro, and sinful. "The
Lord did say, whoever looks on a woman with lust has already committed
adultery in his mind. We are our brother's keeper," he said.

In
other words, if a woman's miniskirt derails the ministerial motives of
the man in the pew behind her, she could be, in theory, an accomplice
to his sin.

Of course I don't know, because I don't know them, but I can imagine that at least three kinds of hypocrites might be talking there. The prudish old woman, the jealous younger scold with a figure as curvaceous as an ironing board, and the sexual temptress who hides her intentions, but not her own endowments, behind a pretense of modesty: I could show off my breasts too, if I was another sort of woman, and if that doesn't have you staring goggle-eyed at my 36 C's, you must be blind!

Actually, there might be a fourth sort of hypocrite. The article doesn't say that that member of the choir is a woman.

One of the most evil passages in the New Testament, and one I'm sure was sneaked into the gospels later by some follower of that body-hater Paul, is Matthew 5:28:

But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

Dedicated altar boy and Catholic school goody-goody earning straight A's in religion class that I was, I swear I never heard of that one until Jimmy Carter decided to confess to it to Playboy magazine, thereby selling an awful lot of copies of that issue to men who'd never ever bought Playboy before, even for the articles, and causing them to lust in their hearts over the future Mrs Jimmy Connors---and it didn't help their sons who found the magazine hidden under the front seat of the car along the pathway to heaven either---which shows you that even a good man like Jimmy Carter can be the agent of Satan and it's one more reason that one of my favorites of Jesus' teachings, one I'm sure is really his, and also from Matthew, is the one about shutting yourself up in your house when the religious fit comes over you.

But what it's provided is another excuse for institutional misogyny and 2000 years of blaming young women for being pretty.

The passage implicitly assigns guilt to the woman as well as the man, as if she was complicit in the man's lusting after her. He's committed adultery with her.

Her fault! Not mine! I was just stading here, minding my own business, thinking nothing but the purest of pure thoughts, and all of sudden I'm staring down six inches of freckled cleavage and committing adultery in my heart like a house afire! The harlot!

But I don't think that's what this priest is doing here, and I'm not going to get into the Church's hypocrisy and general creepiness on the subject of sex or the self-defeating absurdity of a celibate priesthood.

Anyway, the reporter interviewed another priest on the subject and he said, "You know what's a bigger bug with me? Cell phones."

Some random thoughts first on my way to a point.

For 25 years or so now, from the rise of Madonna in the arms of a bevy gay male dancers to the decline into trailer park soap opera of Britney, people, mostly mothers who have to buy their clothes, have been complaining that the fashion for teenage girls has been some version of streetwalker.

Based on my observations, I'd say the fashion is tomboy, just that it looks like their t-shirts tend to shrink a lot in the wash.

Last week in the West Village, the streets were awash with beautiful young women in small dresses chosen to accentuate the positive and make virtues of the negative while on several street corners there were gangs of actual streetwalkers, some of whom may have been women, and based on a quick comparison, I'd say that streetwalkers do not actually dress to be sexy. They dress the way they do because they can't wear sandwich boards advertisings their prices.

We need a better definition of lust. Giving yourself whiplash as you snap your head around to watch a pair of shorts filled out as God and nature and Calvin Klein intended sway down the street is a markedly different thing than hatching schemes to turn yourself into Angelo in Measure for Measure.

The sin here isn't lusting in one's heart, it's taking one's eye off the road if one's trying to follow those shorts while driving.

The greatest advance in retail, as far as I'm concerned, the one that
provided the greatest boon to humankind, was not Wal-Mart or Costco or
ebay or Amazon.com. It was Victoria's Secret.

An appreciation for the charms of pretty women or pretty men is one of the joys of life. If it's lust in the heart and adultery to notice that a fellow human being would almost certainly look terrific naked, then I commit adultery 10 or 20 times a day and I'm not the least bit sorry for it. This is the time of year when the sight of a lovely woman in a summer outfit carrying her shoes is often the making of my day. Of my week!

If I'm going to hell for this, then God is a woman. A particular woman. Andrea Dworkin.

Adultery itself, whether in the heart or in a motel room, is underappreciated, but I'm not going there. And I'm not confessing anything either. I'm just saying.

There is such a thing as Platonic adultery. This can be a sin or it can be something good and wonderful. Depends on how much it interferes with your non-Platonic relationships.

I've had many five minute Platonic affairs with strangers. I think five minute affairs are quite common, although most people probably don't know that that's what just happened to them. You meet someone in the course of going about your otherwise innocent business, fall into what you think is an idle, friendly conversation out of politeness, and almost instantly you and that person understand each other and have as intimate a connection as any other couple in love. I think such friendships happen all the time. Some of my best friends are people I knew for only ten minutes. Think about it. You've probably had dozens of these friendships too. So I think there's no reason that some of these friendships can't blossom into affairs.

I once had an affair like this right under the nose of the blonde. The woman I was in love with for those five minutes was having her affair right in front of her husband and kids. We were all at Valley Forge on a blustery but pleasant fall day and our two families encountered each other and mingled at one of the encampments. The woman and I got to chatting and before we knew it we had wandered away from our spouses and children. We only had eyes for each other. Just a couple of friendly, middle-aged people having a pleasant conversation but somehow locked into each other as if we had known each other for years and years.

Then it was time to go and we said goodbye and that was it.

I expect sensible women will come along here and tell me my imagination and vanity were playing games with me. She was just being friendly. Shakespeare's Sister will point me to this post of hers about a study that shows that men are far, far, far more likley to read sexual chemistry into a casual, friendly encounter with a woman.

Young lout on the prowl: If she doesn't want to get hit on, why's she dressed like that? She asking for a guy to pay attention to her!

Wiser, older man who talks like Maurice Chevalier in Gigi: Yes, this may be true. But the guy whose attention she's looking for is probably not you.

Heading now for my point. America has become a nation of slobs. We don't bother. People show up at funerals dressed for the beach. At the 10 year old's spring concert, there were fathers there---fathers, not big brothers, thirty-something men---in shorts and sandals and t-shirts. It was not a hot day. There were three or four of them wearing baseball caps in the auditorium. Their sons on stage were dressed better. Dressed more like grown men.

The mothers were only slightly better dressed.

The older sisters, the high school girls come to see their little brothers and sisters perform, in their miniskirts and tight tops with plunging necklines could be described as dressing slutty, if you are a prude. To my eyes, they were the only ones in the audience who'd bothered to dress up for the occasion. They were the ones who knew what was appropriate.

By the way, if it is true that girls are outdistancing boys on the roads to successful adulthoods---a bigger if than most people assume---that's one of the reasons---girls bother. They are taught to bother. They learn what is appropriate.

They learn manners.

Good manners are more than mere politeness. They are a way of behaving like a civilized adult.

Maybe Madonna and Britney have done some accidental good. In having to police their daughters' closets, parents have been teaching them to at least think about how to make smart choices about what they wear on what occasion.

There are times when a short skirt and a plunging neckline are signs of a kind of modesty, a modesty that is social not sexual, a modesty that acknowledges that there are situations when one has to comport oneself like a grownup, a modesty that admits that there are occasions when just being oneself is rude.

The story in the newspaper doesn't do a good job of describing just what that priest is seeing from his pulpit. He may be looking out at pew after pew of Madonna and Britney wannabes, not a few of whom are well over thirty. Maybe all he's asking for is a little common decency.

But there are limits to how much of her attractions (or his attractions) a healthy youngish person can hide, no matter how demurely she dresses. From the pulpit the priest may find himself looking down many a teenager's plunging neckline. But from the middle pews where I tend to sit I find myself distracted from my hymnal and rosary by many lovely middle-aged rear ends in sensible slacks.

I'd still like to give the pastor the benefit of the doubt. Still, if I were him, I think I'd think the problem's slobbiness not sluttiness, even though they sometimes go together. Like these guys say, even though they believe they're talking about something else, on this score, men are as bad, if not worse:

A guy wearing muscle shirts or sagging jeans can do the same thing
to women, said John Rosario, 15, who attends the Dubois Street Church
of God, a Pentecostal Hispanic congregation in Newburgh. "You can dress
like that on the side," he said. "It shouldn't be in here."

"When
I first started coming to church, I was dressing street-wise," said pal
Darryl Natal, 16. He said he wore baggy pants and T-shirts that hung
almost to his knees. "Once I started changing my ways, I started
getting more respect."

It could be that the young women in church wearing short summer dresses are the only ones who are dressing as if they know they are in God's house.

The other priest, the one who's more bugged by cell phones is just glad he isn't pastor of a church down on the Jersey Shore.

Down there, he says, parishoners come to mass on their way to the beach.

For those of you just tuning in, over the weekend I posted pretty steadily about my trip to New York City last Thursday for the Drum Major Institute's benefit honoring Kos, Anna Burger, and Wynton Marsalis. One or two of the posts have even been about what happened at the benefit. The others are about the good time I had just being in New York. I was writing as memories sorted themselves out so the posts went up out of sequence. I've rearranged a few since and I'll be reposting the rest in their proper places later. Rather than making you scroll down and then back up, I thought maybe a table of contents would be helpful. I've also included links to posts by others who were at this soiree and have different takes on the events.

Chapter One. My New York City. In which a very young Lance Mannion is made to feel at home in the big city by a tough waitress in a diner near Madison Square Garden.

Chapter Six. Wynton Marsalis. In which the jazz great defines partisanship in a way guaranteed not please the highly partisan bloggers in the room.

The ceremonies over, bloggers gather in the basement to plot, conspire, conform to stereotypes, show-off, swill more free booze, and commit other nefarious acts. Tom Watson and Maha Barbara give the official version. Blue Girl reveals what actually went on.

Chapter Seven. The Hog Pit. In which a group of liberal bloggers prove they can't agree on where to go to get a bite to eat, let alone on any agenda handed down to them by their master, Markos.

Amazingly, we can't find a place to get a cup of coffee on this part of Broadway at 1 in the morning. Coffee's probably nearby if we just hunt hard enough. But one of us is wearing a pair of brand new shoes that have been doing a number on that one of us' feet and a lot of walking's not in the cards. We wander a block, down to 8th Ave. and have a choice between a too brightly lit bread and dessert place and a not too dimly lit bar. We choose the bar where the one of us with the new shoes thinks she can kick them off under a table where no one will see or care.

Close to last call, the place is nearly empty except for a group of tall, burly middle-aged men in jeans and workshirts at the bar.

"Bears," Uncle Merlin tells me the next day when I tell him about it. He's thinking like a gay man.

"Stage hands," I counter, thinking like a theater buff who knows the bar's around the corner from Studio 54 where the Roundabout Theatre Company's staging Threepenny Opera and figuring that at this time of night, the final curtain having been wrung down a couple of hours ago, the props have all just been put away and the stage dressed for tomorrow's performance and now it's Miller Time.

I suppose we both could have been right, though we were both just as probably wrong.

Whatever they were, they all smiled at us and nodded as we came in, and the middle-aged waitress who had just cashed out and was on her way home welcomed us and showed us to a back table as if she had been able to tell at a glance we were looking for a little quiet space to ourselves and she apologized in a sincere and friendly voice that she couldn't take our orders herself but, she said, the bartender would be glad to help us, which he was, and he didn't care that all we wanted was a couple of sodas and he pretended not to see when the new shoes were kicked off and so we finished the night there, talking quietly, sipping sodas, relaxing and unwinding, content and happy, but thinking next time we'll wear sneakers.

After midnight, in the West Village, things just beginning to happen for the young and beautiful, but it's feeling like time for us to call it a night and head back up town. Go to catch a cab at the corner where Hudson intersects with West 14th and 9th Ave. The broad cobblestoned intersection empty of all cars except cabs. Dozens of cabs. All full.

We stand beside a trio of young men waving at passing cabs. Before long there's a group of young women behind us.

A cab finally pulls over and the young men move towards it. A pretty little blonde in a green party dress steps out of the group of women. She has a very determined look about her.

"Wasn't that your cab?" she asks us as the young men pile in.

No, we say, they were here ahead of us. She eyes us skeptically. Something about us makes her think we're too innocent and non-New Yorkerish to be trusted out without a lead. We're the type who'd stand there all night letting pushy people steal our cabs. Determinedly, she steps out into the road and waves down another taxi.

"This one's yours!" she says, opening the door. "Get in!"

We obey. She closes the door behind us and looking even more determined goes after another cab for her and her friends.

In my college days when I used to get to the City a lot I spent most of my time in the East Village. The friends I stayed with were theater types and we never wandered far from the off-off-Broadway precincts where they lived and worked and went to school. Which was fine by me. There was a whole world there that I never came close to completely exploring. I don't think I ever made it much closer to New Jersey than Washington Square Park in those days, let alone all the way to the West Village.

So when, in answer to my demand that someone name a place where we could get coffee and dessert and sit and talk in relative peace and quiet, a modest, unassuming voice said, "Florent," I had no idea where or what Florent was and in accepting the suggestion, for all I knew, I was about to navigate us into a leather bar or an Italian social club or another, pretentious, trendoid hot spot like the place we'd just left.

And looking down into the shoebox of darkness that's Ganesvoort at 11 o'clock at night was not reassuring. There looked to be nothing alive and awake down there except for a lone slim-figured female in a party dress with a puffed out skirt, wobbling drunkenly on her high heels into the deeper darkness of an overpass half a block on. I was half-inclined to give up on Florent then and there but I decided we'd better follow the girl at least until she was out from under the overpass. Besides thinking we might need to rush to her rescue from hands reaching out from the shadows, I was hoping she would lead us to Florent.

We didn't, and she didn't, but the sharpest-eyed member of our party spotted lighted windows shining between the parked cars and trucks on our right. The drunken girl turned a corner into the light on Washington Street and we crossed the street to see what was what behind those windows.

The steel lettering over the awning that spanned the storefront spelled out R & L Restaurant, but there was a small pink neon sign in the window. florent.

Now at this point in my narrative I should be beginning my own description of Florent. I could do it, although all I have to work from in my notebooks is:

Chrome.

Ancient Chinese busboys.

Very tall, very thin, very light-skinned, very handsome, very gay black waiter with a shaved head, wearing Hawaiian shirt and rimless glasses.

Mirrors.

Pie.

Fortunately, Donald Westlake did all the work for me. Serendipity strikes! Last night I read this in Drowned Hopes:

At three in the morning, the only action on two-block-long Ganesvoort Street, in the middle of the wholesale meat section of Manhattan, south of Fourteenth Street in the far West Village, is Florent, a good twenty-four-hour-a-day French bistro operating in an old polished-chrome-and-long-counter diner. The diner's short end is toward the street, so the counter and tables run straight back under the vivid lights, with hard surfaces that bounce and echo the noise of cheerful conversation. While all around this one building the meat packers and wholesale butchers are closed and silent and dark, the bone trucks all empty and hosed down for the night, and the metal gates closed over the loading docks, the cars and limousines still wait clustered in front of the warm bright lights of the bistro, which seems at all times to be filled with animated talking laughing people who are just delighted to be awake now.

Westlake wrote that in the late 1980s, but nothing much has changed. There were no limos out front, that's about the only difference. And Westlake didn't mention the blueberry pie, which was terrific.

But his last point is still Florent's best feature, the place was full of animated talking laughing people delighted to be awake right then.

Restaurant staff is moving furniture around us. A couch floats over
people's heads, carried by a pair of tall waiters in black. Discussion's breaking up anyway. The suggestion to continue the party
somewhere else rises up from several quarters. Where to though?

Personally I'm all for any place that offers one:enough quiet to make
holding a conversation possible and pleasurable, two: coffee by the
potful, three: proof that I'm still in New York City.

The group decision's a place that doesn't sound as if it's going to
supply any one of the three---a barbeque joint on the corner. The Hog Pit.

If I'd had a guide book handy I'd have known for sure I wasn't
going. Country Western music on the jukebox, a little piece of the
good ol' South, a honky-stomping air? But even without advanced
warning like that, the idea of pulled pork at this hour is less than
appetizing. I start making plans to kidnap the company I most want to
keep and make a dash for the first place that looks like Edward Hopper
might have painted it or Dawn Powell put it in a novel.

Funny thing happens on the way out the door. Our group breaks into
two, and the half I'm part of gets lost in the maze of stairwells
trying to find the coatcheck room in order to retrieve jackets,
briefcases, and one mysterious canvas bag that looks like it contains
groceries. By the time we make it to the street the rest of the
group's nowhere in sight.

Mosey on over to the Hog Pit, right up to the door, and stop. We're
all balking at going in, everybody having the same thought. This is
not what we had in mind. The more literarily-star-struck of us start
making the case for taking a cab up to the Algonquin where we can rub
elbows with the ghosts of Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and other
wits and writers of the early days of the New Yorker. But nobody knows
exactly where it is, not even those of us who live and work in Manhattan,
and our leader, Tom Watson, has been waylaid by an ex-Marine down on his luck who's looking for money for a sandwich. Tom, being a good-natured sort and in a convivial mood, has the ex-Marine telling him his life story, and, not surprisingly, while we're waiting for the Marine, who of course is no minimalist, he's a regular Tolstoy of verbal autobiographers, to bring his memoirs up to date, the air starts to go from people's sails.

Work in the morning. Long drives and long train rides home. Spouses, partners, and pets waiting.

"Ok," I say, "This is the Village. There's got to be 6000 places around here that offer coffee, relative quiet, and the sense of being trapped inside an Edward Hopper painting. One of you supposed Manhattanites name one now!"

And one of them does. And just like that, after some hasty goodnights and (sincere) promises to get together again soon, I'm on my way to having all three things I wanted plus sole possession of the company I most want to keep.__________________

Turns out the rest of our group wasn't even in the Hog Pit. They'd passed it up to go in search of burgers.

Disappointing. Didn't get a chance to shake hands with Wynton Marsalis. I was ready. Had a good opening gambit. Good as in I had
something to say and wouldn't have stood there stuttering about how I
liked his music. Was going to tell him how one of the best birthday
presents the blonde ever gave me was taking me to a concert back in Syracuse with him and
his father and his brothers, Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason.

Had my one shot at him after all the speeches. Tracked him down at the
small stage at the front of the room. A jazz combo featuring a
former student of his was playing but he wasn't watching, he was
letting himself be schmoozed by various party goers. I was next in
line to schmooze but just before the schmoozer ahead of me was ready to
let go of her grip on his attention and sleeve, his former student
waved him up on stage to sit in for a set.

On keyboard.

Guess he hadn't thought to bring his ax.

When I called Nancy Nall a few days later to report the bad news that our hero
James Wolcott hadn't been at the party, duty had called him out of the
city that day, and how I'd missed out on talking to Wynton Marsalis, she told me that Marsalis loves to sit in. He shows up
unexpectedly at clubs and inevitably he's up on stage, sitting in.
That's what jazz musicians do. They play. Nance told me that one time
Marsalis was sitting in somewhere, playing whatever, and just as he was
hitting the sweetest of sweet notes, somebody's cell phone went off.

This was in the old days before downloadable ringtones. Not that it
would have been any better if the phone had started playing Popeye the Sailor Man or the theme from Star Wars. But the cell phone rang
with a loud ascending and descending series of seemingly random
chimes. The owner of the phone had to fumble to answer it and while he
or she fumbled Marsalis, without missing a beat, began to mimic the
cell phone's ring on his trumpet.

Then he began to riff on it. He turned the cell phone's ring into
it a little jazz aria that he somehow managed to bring back around and
seque, beautifully, into the song he'd been playing when the cell had
gone off, right at the note where he'd left off to chase the ring tone.

The crowd went nuts.

Stuff of legend.

Nance said that if she'd been there at the benefit Thursday night, that's what she'd have asked him about, how much of that story was true.

She guessed all of it. She just would have liked to hear him tell it.

I would have too, if I'd known about it before to ask him. But I had
my gambit and, while I was waiting for the schmoozer ahead of me to let
other people have a turn, I thought of something else to say to him,
a real question.

About something he'd said in his speech accepting his award.

He'd talked about growing up in a slowly de-segregating South, how
his family had lived on the wrong side of the railroad tracks and the
right side at the same time. There was a rail line that divided the
city by race.

On the one side lived the white folks, on the other side all the black folks.

But there was another set of tracks that divided the black neighborhoods.

On the one side lived all the middle class and working class people
and those few poor people who managed to just keep their heads above
water most of the time. This is where Marsalis and his family lived.

On the other side lived the really poor people.

Marsalis said that when he was really young he would go days on end,
weeks, without seeing a white face. But his daddy was a jazz
musician and his friends weren't white or black they were other jazz
musicians. Some were paler than others is all. Sometimes some of
Ellis Marsalis' friends would come by the house. Whenever the visitors
included one of the paler musicians Wynton's friends would be both
scared and thrilled. They'd find Wynton and ask him, as if begging to
be let in on a family secret.

That's what white people meant in that neighborhood, the intrusion of trouble into people's lives.

One day, shortly after Martin Luther King was murdered, Marsalis' parents sat him down for a talk.

From now on, they told him, you're going to the white school across town.

That's what I would have liked to ask him about if I'd had the chance.

I would have asked him why his parents decided to do that and how King's death figured in their decision.

I suppose I could guess, but I'd rather have heard him tell it.

I was surprised he didn't answer it in his speech the moment her
brought it up. But a lot of his speech was a bit disjointed. He'd
seemed uncomfortable making it. I've seen him on TV talking
extemporaneously and he was a good public speaker. Of course he was
talking about music. Thursday night he felt called upon to talk about
politics with the rest of us, I guess, and it made him unsure of
himself. He might have been improvising. He might have had another
speech planned and changed his mind about it while he was listening to
speeches ahead of his, which were all political, all partisan.

Partisanship seemed to be on his mind. He doesn't like it. He was
trying to define it in a way that would have explained to us what he
didn't like about it.

But maybe it's his temperament. In his speech introducing Marsalis,
Andrew Young said that Marsalis had always been one to go against the
grain. Growing up a young jazz musician in New Orleans where Dixieland
ruled, Marsalis had played be-bop. When he'd come to New York where a
cooler, more sophisticated jazz moved the smoke around in the clubs,
Marsalis had veered off towards classical music.

At a party where progressives were celebrating and cheerleading their partisanship, he decided to change the beat.

Partisanship to him, it was clear as he went on, was what he met up with at the white schools.

Things were hard for him at school.

I never got nigger-ed so much in my life, he said. Before or since.

Marsalis made one white friend. A girl who'd transfered in to the
school from somewhere else, somewhere far away. One day Marsalis asked
her, "How come you hang out with me? How come you're not like these
other crackers around here?"

"Oh," the girl said simply, "I'm from Montana. We hate Indians there."

So partisanship, Marsalis was telling us, was very much like what
the rest of us call prejudice, and in case we didn't get it, Marsalis
went on to say how he doesn't like to hear losers talk about winners.
Nobody likes to hear losers talk about winners, he said to a room that
included a whole bunch of political bloggers who spend a good chunk of our day in
the role of losers talking about the winners, explaining to them and
ourselves why they weren't really the winners or at least why they
shouldn't be the winners.

Partisanship, as Marsalis seemed to see it, is losers telling winners that they had voted stupidly last time out.

The people who voted stupidly don't need to hear it, he said.

"A lot of the people who voted stupidly are saying to themselves, Damn! I voted stupidly!"

Partisanship, I think he was trying to tell us, is a matter of
identifying other people's stupidity and despising them for it. If
that's what it is, then it isn't much different from prejudice.

"How can you hate me?" Marsalis asked us as if we were standing in
for the crackers who'd nigger-ed him back in school. "You don't know
me. You only know what you dislike about me."

Like I said, his speech was a bit disjointed. He didn't bother with
transitions and he dropped points before finishing them. I do think he
was improvising but I don't know. I'd like to ask him.

And he seemed to be calling on us partisans to change our tune, find
another approach to the song, at least, try a new beat, a different key.

If I ever do get a chance to meet him, this is what I'll ask him.
I'll ask him about his parents' decision to send him to the white
school and I'll ask him about partisanship.

There was a silent auction going on at the DMI benefit. One of the prizes was you get to be editor of the Nation for a day. Kos opened his speech by saying that if he won the first thing he was going to do was fire Alexander Cockburn.

I didn't get the joke. But most everybody else laughed. Maybe it was a "Hey the famous guy made what he thinks is a witty remark" laugh. Probably, though, there's some history between Kos and Cockburn I'm not in on. I'm usually not in on these things.

At any rate, maybe Kos' poke at Cockburn explains why Andrew Young began his introduction of Wynton Marsalis talking about Jimmy Carter.

Young, Carter's ambassador to the UN, is the chair of DMI's board of directors. He knows Marsalis from way back. Knows him from when he was a kid. Knows him because he was friends with Marsalis' father, jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis. Ellis and Young went to the same high school. Young was ahead of Ellis and he told Wynton that he likes to kid Ellis about how he failed to take care of the school. "I left your daddy in charge of the place, and a year later they closed it." I suspect this was where Young had planned to begin his speech.

But before he got there he talked about Jimmy Carter, I'm guessing because of Kos' shot at Cockburn. It reminded Young he didn't much care for Cockburn either.

Way back, in 1975, Cockburn wrote an article in which he accused Carter of being a racist. That made Young mad.

"Jimmy Carter was a lot of things," Young said, "But he was not a racist."

Young wrote something defending Carter on that score. Short time after it appeared somebody from Jimmy Carter's campaign called Young and asked him if he'd like to help out. Young was skeptical. No way in hell an obscure ex-governor of Georgia gets himself elected President of the United States, Young told the Carter aide. The aide said, come down and talk to the Governor anyway, see what you think after that.

Next thing I know, Young more or less told us, I'm the United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

Young is still proud of his service, still proud to have worked for Jimmy Carter, still proud to call Carter a friend.

"We achieved all our foreign policy objectives, we didn't start any wars, and we did it without killing anybody or getting anybody killed," he said. This is mostly true. I don't think it's right not to count the soldiers who got killed in the botched attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran. But in the main it's true.

That's why we all cheered.

Young went on, "I don't know why that's all considered weak, but it is to some people."

Some people would rather the United States failed on all fronts, just as long as they could feel good that we'd killed a lot of our enemies while we failed.

Failure is strength, success is weakness, war is peace.__________________________________________

Anna Burger told us about a man she knows who worked in meat processing plant. Smithfield Foods. The man stood all day in a room where the temperature routinely broke 100 degrees and caught the carcasses of hogs coming down the line from where they'd been slaughtered. The carcasses weighed up to 400 pounds. He caught them on his shoulder and handed them to someone else who hung them up on a hook so that someone else could start slicing them up into hams and roasts and chops.

All day he did this. "The line never stops," he told Burger. The work broke many strong men. They couldn't take it after a while and walked right off the job. Burger's friend said there were plenty of times when he wanted to walk away too. He never did. He couldn't. He had a family to support.

He made 11,000 dollars a year.

The CEO of the company made 11 million. Before bonuses and incentives and stock options. The CEO made more before lunch on January 1st than Burger's friend made all year.

The workers had no health benefits. They had a half hour for lunch but because it took ten minutes to walk off the floor to the lunch room and ten mintues to get back so they had to wolf down their sandwiches. No chance to relax, no chance to think, no chance to be human beings for even a little while.

They were organic parts in a machine.

One day the guy got hurt. He needed time off to recover. The company gave him all the time he needed.

They fired him.

This is life without unions.

Serfdom.

People used as meat machines.

This is how the people running America now want it to be.

Europe in the Middle Ages. Russia under the czars. South America under the dictators and military juntas.

Came into New York Thursday by way of the GW Bridge, took the Henry Hudson Parkway into midtown, and headed up towards Broadway on W 54th, which took me past, among other landmarks, the studio where The Colbert Report is taped---a small, blank-looking brick building with a bare metal door and some sawhorses out front for the would-be audience to line up behind---and the Midtown North Precinct House, where there was something odd-looking to me about the crowd of cops hanging out on the sidewalk by their lined up white patrol cars.

They all looked too neat, the cops and the patrol cars, actually. The cops were standing around with the too purposeful attitudes of guys with nothing to do trying to look like they were busy and on the job, and that was normal enough. But they also were all of a type. Well, cops are traditionally all of a type. These cops weren't of that traditional type, though. They were all youngish, all in excellent shape, but trim and wiry like runners not bulked up like the weight-lifters.

And they all looked short.

Has something changed in the culture of New York City cops? Are there new health and fitness requirements?

Or does only a certain physical type get posted to Midtown North?

And what happened to the blue and whites? And what's with the motto CPR---Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect? Somehow that's not reassuring to me. It would sound fine as the motto of a long-distance trucking company, the kind of company that wants you to think it's serious about the How's My Driving Call 1-800--CAN-MYAS stickers on the liftgates.

But while I would hope that police officers practice courtesy, demonstrate professionalism, and show respect for citizens and their rights as a matter of course, when I call a cop those qualities aren't foremost on my mind.

Ah well, nevermind. It was a gorgeous day, despite the heat, and even though the precinct house was in the shade, the colors of the flag flying over the doorway and the blue of the cops' uniforms were as bright and pretty as a watercolor.

(Archie Godwin puts in a call to Nero Wolfe from the apartment of Phoebe Gunther, an uncooperative witness in a murder investigation who may be smarter than Archie, a fact he about her he likes almost as much as he likes her looks, although both things about her are making it hard for him to think straight.)

"Mr Wolfe? Archie. I'm up here with Miss Gunther in her apartment, and I don't believe it's a good plan to bring her down there as you suggested. In the first place, she's extremely smart, but that's not it. She's the one I've been dreaming about the past ten years, remember what I've told you? I don't mean she's beautiful, that's merely a matter of taste, I only mean she's exactly what I had in mind. Therefore it will be much better to let me handle her. She began by making a monkey of me, but I was suffering from shock. It may take a month or a week or even a year, because it is very difficult to keep your mind on your work under these circumstances, but you can count on me. You go on to bed and I'll get in touch with you in the morning."

I arose from the stool and turned to face the couch, but she wasn't there. She was, instead, over toward the door, in a dark blue coat with a fox collar, standing in front of a mirror, adjusting a dark blue contraption on her head.

She glanced at me. "All right, come on."

"Come on where?"

"Don't be demure." She turned from the mirror. "You worked hard trying to figure out a way to get me down to Nero Wolfe's office, and you did a good job. I'll give you Round Two. Some day we'll play the rubber. Right now I'm taking on Nero Wolfe, so it will have to be postponed. I'm glad you don't think I'm beautiful. Nothing irritates a woman more than to be thought beautiful."

I had my coat on and she had the door open. The bag under her arm was the same dark blue material as the hat. On the way to the elevator I explained, "I didn't say I didn't think you were beautiful. I said---"

"I heard what you said. It stabbed me clear through. Even from a stranger who may also be my enemy, it hurt. I'm vain and that's that. Because it just happens that I can't see straight and I do think I'm beautiful."

"So do---" I began, but just in time I saw the corner of her mouth moving and bit it off. I'm telling this straight. If anyone thinks I was muffing everything she sent my way I won't argue, but I would like to point out that I was right there with her, looking at her and listening to her, and the hell of it was that she was beautiful.

First time I was on my own in New York City, I was 15. I was there on a class field trip to see a play. A matinee. We had a few hours before the show to wander about and get some lunch, both of which I did, the first part, the wandering about, in the pouring rain. I wasn't wearing a raincoat and I didn't have an umbrella and I didn't much care. I was 15. I'd been planning to grab a hot dog from a vendor in front of some landmark like the New York Public Library or Grand Central Station. The rain put the kaibosh on that plan. So I didn't know where to go for lunch, all I knew is that I didn't want to go to McDonalds. I wanted to eat lunch in a real New York City kind of place. I found a little diner, went in, and sat down at the counter, dripping wet, and trying to read the menu while wiping the water out of my eyes with my sleeve.

A waitress peered at me from the far end of the counter. She didn't look glad to see me. But she moved down to wait on me.

She was middle-aged. To my 15 year old eyes she looked grandmother age, which means she could have been as young as 40. She was solidly built, with heavy, muscular arms, and big fists that she put on her hips as she stood there, frowning hard at me. I began to worry she was about to tell me that I wasn't allowed in there for some reason.

She frowned at me for what seemed a very long time and then she reached under the counter, came up with a clean white rag and slowly, very gently, wiped the water from my eyes and from my forehead and then smoothed back my wet hair and gave it a little tousling to dry it a bit and smoothed it down again. When she decided I was dry enough and presentable, she put away the rag, and took out her pad and pencil.

"Whatcha havin', dear?" she said. She never stopped frowning. But her eyes were laughing.

IMO the commenter quoted above exemplifies the “let’s-keep-shooting-ourselves-in-the-foot” faction of progressivism. Consider: We are up against a big, well-funded, and well-organized extremist right-wing faction that has taken over the White House and Congress and is well on the way toward taking over the judiciary. This faction spouts rhetoric about “freedom” and “democracy” but in fact supports radical theories about the Constitution that have put this nation on the road to totalitarianism. The regime in power has gotten us into one pointless and ruinous war and appears to be preparing to get us into another one. They are threatening the health of the planet by ignoring global warming, and the point at which it will be too late to act is fast approaching. They have strengthened their grip on power by corrupting elections and appropriating news media so that citizens can’t learn the truth. They are strangling our economy with profligate spending combined with irresponsible tax cuts, and every second that passes we are deeper and deeper in debt to other nations, like China.

The house is on fire, in other words. Some of us think our first priority is to put the fire out any way we can. We can argue about what wallpaper pattern would look best in the master bedroom some other time.

Barbara's responding to a progressive commenter at Unclaimed Territory who resented the way some Democratic bloggers and some bloggers who are progressives but usually support Democrats aren't open to the idea of third party challenges to Democrats.

The main subject of her post is Kos and his friends, critics, and enemies on the left side of the bandwidth. But the passage I quoted, which sums up the crisis as stirringly and electrifyingly as a fire alarm in the middle of the night, had me thinking of a less generalized part of the struggle, the part being played by one man, the Quisling from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman.

Quick now, because it can't be said enough. Joe Lieberman's failure is not that he's not right on Iraq. His failure isn't even that he's been insufficiently liberal. His failure is that he has been so eager to ingratiate himself with the Republicans in Congress and President Bush that he has effectively turned himself into an enemy of his own party.

Anyone who wants to know why Democrats, not just anti-war progressives, are so pissed at Lieberman should read this article from the Hartford Courant. The reporter dismisses the Lamont challenge as an anti-war thing, but it's this little bit from Lieberman himself as he spoke to the Middlesex Chamber of Commerce that's most telling:

"I've been really fed up by the rigid partisanship in Washington, not
just about the war," Lieberman told reporters later. Of Lamont, he
said, "Part of his attacks on me are that I haven't been partisan
enough, haven't been a polarizer enough."

That's it in a nutshell. The Republican majority in the Senate has shut the Democrats out of everything and Joe thinks the problem is that Democrats like Lamont are too partisan.

Joe is bipartisan. Ask him. His definition of bipartisan is the same as the Republicans'. Democrats need to just do what the Republicans tell them to do. Go along to get along.

Lieberman promised the crowd he would return to Washington to be effective, not partisan.

Lieberman is an appeaser and an accomodationist. There doesn't appear to be an issue that will make him stand and fight like a Democrat. Whenever Harry Reid plans a move his first concern has to be how to keep Lieberman from getting in the way or undermining the Democrats' position.

Lieberman was introduced by David Cohen, the executive vice president of Comcast Corp., who called Lieberman a rarity.

"He is a pro-business Democrat," Cohen said.

Pro-business Democrats aren't rarities. What are rare are Democrats like Lieberman who are that content to be so totally in the pocket of big business as any Republican.

Last year there was some rumor-mongering going on, speculating that Lieberman's flattering and fawning was designed to get himself a cabinet appointment. He was goinng to be Bush's next Secretary of Defense, as if Rumsfeld will ever resign. But what worried me at the time and what worries me now is that Lieberman was and is actually positioning himself to bolt the Democratic Party.

Lieberman seems to be more comfortable with the Republicans, but his attraction to their Party I would bet is based on their holding all the cards. If he were to join them, he could become chairman of several of important committees. What he likes and what he wants a share of is their power.

His refusal to promise to support Ned Lamont and not run as an independent if he loses the primary wouldn't infuriate me as much as disappointment me, if Lieberman were another sort of man. It's natural that someone who has served so long as a United States Senator wouldn't want to give up the job.

And, if he were another sort of man, I might believe that he thinks that his running as an Independent would be in the best interest of the country and the Party. Better he seem to be a disloyal Democrat than let his seat fall into the hands of a Republican.

Perhaps that's what he's telling himself.

That is most likely what Chuck Schumer is telling himself.

Tom Watson's disappointed with our Senator because Schumer's been talking about supporting Lieberman if he loses the primary and decides to run as an independent.

I think there's a lot of counting unhatched chickens when it comes to Lamont's challenge to Lieberman. Joe's hurting in the polls, but he's still ahead. But if he loses I wish Schumer would use his influence to convince Lieberman to do the gracious and loyal thing and back his party's nominee, something Lamont's promised to do if he loses.

But if any Democrat had that kind of influence with Lieberman we wouldn't be talking about needing to get rid of Lieberman.

Any politician with the usual dose of vanity's going to feel hurt and resentful if his party abandons him, and I'm sure Lieberman, who has more than the usual dose, feels he's being abandoned. I'm sure he can't understand why we're all so mad at him.

So I would say his talk of an independent run falls within the bounds of forgiveable pride. I would say it if I wasn't talking about Joe Lieberman.

Schumer knows Lieberman better than I do. I don't know if I agree with Tom and Jane Hamsher that Schumer's possible support of Lieberman over Lamont in the fall is all about maintaining the privileges of incumbancy.

If I were in Schumer's shoes I would thinking about this.

Connecticut should be a safe seat for the Democrats. If Lieberman wins, it definitely is. If he loses and sits it out, it probably is. But if he loses and runs as an independent two things stand a very good chance of happening, neither one any good.

Lieberman wins and comes back to the Senate angry at the Democrats and relishing his newfound role as an independent. The polls are looking good for the Democrats and their chances in November, but if they regain the majority, it won't be by more than a few votes.

An independent Joe Lieberman will be a much courted man by both parties in a nearly evenly divided Senate, and he has more to gain from playing nice with Republicans, whom he already likes and who already like him.

I already think that there's a good chance that whether Lieberman wins with a D or I after his name, he'll arrive in the Senate in January with an R there.

If I were Chuck Schumer, I would be thinking that at least for right now my best plan is to do my damnedest to keep Lieberman feeling happy and beloved in the Democratic fold.

There's a voice in my head saying, So what, who needs him? Let him go and to hell with him!

But then I think about the crisis Barbara describes so eloquently.

Who needs Lieberman?

Unfortunately, we may.

The Democrats need bodies in the Senate to add to their majority should they get it. They may need him to win in November to get his body there to make up that majority. Who wants Dick Cheney casting a lot of deciding votes the next two years?

The most depressing part of politics is that issues and principles usually take a backseat to vanity and ambition.

Right now, as an apologist and fellow traveller with the Republican majority, Lieberman's a problem.

But as a supposed member of a slim Democratic majority he can be just as destructive if he keeps crossing the aisle to help recreate Republican majorities.

The best outcome for progressives would be for Lamont to win in the primary and the election.

As things stand, though, the likely outcomes are that Lieberman wins the primary and the election or that Lieberman loses the primary but wins the election.

If I'm Chuck Schumer I know I can't count on Joe Lieberman to be loyal to the Democratic Party.

But maybe I can make him feel some loyalty to Chuck Schumer.____________________________________

I'm looking forward to meeting Tom and Jane and Barbara tonight at the Drum Major Institute's benefit honoring Kos, Wynton Marsalis, and labor activist Anna Burger, which you all know about because you've all clicked repeatedly on that bright orange badge in the top left hand corner of the page, right? I expect to have my head handed to me on this and on everything else all night long. I'll let you know tomorrow how big a horse's patoot I made of myself.